Lenient is a word that some have used to describe the punishment meted out to the racehorse trainer Jim Best following a decision last week that he had probably told a jockey to lose on two horses, for which his licence will be suspended until June. But the 36-year-old, who maintains his innocence, could hardly look less like a man who has been let off lightly as he discusses the toll taken on his business, his health and his family by the controversial case, which rumbled along for a year, thanks in large part to procedural blunders by the British Horseracing Authority.

Sympathy would be in extremely short supply for anyone who had done what the BHA’s disciplinary panel says Best has done. But Best insists he was stunned to learn that the panel had ruled against him, despite also finding that the only BHA witness, the jockey Paul John, had been untruthful and unreliable.

Jim Best case ends amid bitterness and many questions pointing at BHA

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“I’ve done nothing wrong and I’m not happy with even getting a six-month suspension,” Best says, in quietly reflective mood, seated in the front room of a bungalow attached to his stables in Lewes. “I don’t think I should have got anything. I would love to have appealed and if there was a chance I could go straight to the high court tomorrow, I’d be: ‘Yeah, I want to appeal.’

“Even with the cost, I’d want to do everything to get to that high court. Because I feel if I went in a high court situation, hopefully it would be fair and I feel we’d win.”

Before a court of law would consider his case, he would first be required to go through the BHA’s appeal process and Best is not inclined to trust his future to further BHA procedure.

A confessed racing anorak, Best kept a diary at the age of eight where he listed the winners of every race, every day. He can readily produce armfuls of clippings from the Racing Post, Raceform Update, Racing & Football Outlook and the Brighton Argus, some of the writers praising him for having put their readers on to a winner. It was a source of excitement and pride for him to be a trainer and he is qualified for little else, as he says that he left school at the age of 11 to work unpaid in a nearby stable from 5am to 7pm each day.

But his troubles this year have sapped the enthusiasm that helped build a business from scratch. “I’ve lost an awful lot of heart in it now. I still love racing but I can’t get over how all this has happened through one person making an allegation.

“The whole thing has been painful and agonising. You get up each day and you’ve got the feeling as if someone’s died. I know it’s not that dramatic, it’s just how you feel. You just feel absolutely choked up and torn to pieces. You try to pick yourself up for the family’s sake. I was someone who’d never go to the doctor but I hit such lows. Your nerves were shot to bits and you were stressed out [of] your head.”

Best has been on antidepressants and other medication so powerful that when he stopped taking some of it, he reports losing the feeling in his hands for some hours. At the rehearing last month, his evidence was hampered by a persistent, low-level cough. It is still with him and gets worse as he gets agitated.

What he regrets most of all is that he has been unable to shield his boys, now aged eight and 11, from his troubles. The pair returned from a visit to their grandparents recently, having evidently overheard details of the case. “That evening in particular they were so low, to the point where they were choked up and teary. It just makes your heart split, seeing that sort of thing. And then they were trying to give me their pocket money or whatever they’d tried to save to fight the BHA.”

Although the ruling body had to pay Best’s legal fees for the first hearing, he estimates he has made a net loss of £70,000 in defending his corner. The cost does not end there as his stable strength has fallen from 32 horses to 13 since charges were issued, requiring him to lay off four members of staff. Some owners left, others could not be persuaded to reinvest while the case was pending.

Best’s wife, Suzi, has applied for a licence, having completed the necessary training course last summer. They hope she will be able to run the show while he is suspended. “I don’t think it was the chairman’s intention for it to be totally finished,” Best says. “It means that the door’s still open for me in six months. Should I have nothing to come back to?”

The suspicion among those who would prefer Best to face harsher punishment is that he will continue to train under his wife’s name. He denies this. “It’s going to take me a long time to get my head round it all, to be honest. I think I’d enjoy having a bit of time out from it. All the fun I’ve had over the years and the good times, like AP McCoy riding all those winners for us, it’s all been taken out of me. Hopefully it’ll come back but it has really affected me.”

As he discusses his long sequence of legal battles with the BHA, Best reflects on his relationship with the ruling body. “You just had a feeling that the BHA were basically against you. With all that we’ve been through, I feel they’ve gone all out to basically finish me and they’ve done an awful good job of it because they’ve finished me inside and mentally done me no favours at all. It’s just a part of my life that you just want to be over. But it will affect you for ever.”